Skin Deep
by ncfan
Summary: "Wait, you have a scar on your face?" [Missing scene from 'The Ember Island Players.']


I own nothing.

* * *

"Your Zuko costume's pretty good, but the scar's on the wrong side."

"The scar's _not_ on the wrong side!"

Zuko growled and yanked his cloak hood back over his head. He knew there was a reason he hated the Ember Island Players. This play had been kind of funny at some points, if only in a really cringe-inducing way, but really, they couldn't even figure out which side of his face his scar was on? Then again, not even doing that basic level of research would be about par with Ember Island Players' usual standards of quality.

"Wait, you have a scar on your face?"

Zuko craned his head around to look at Toph, who wasn't quite looking at him, but who wore a nakedly curious expression nonetheless. Toph's face didn't have much in the way of filters; she rather reminded him of Ty Lee, in that. She pressed the palms of her hands flat on the floor, and asked, "Well, do you?"

He frowned. Zuko was used to people doing a double-take upon seeing his scar for the first time, was used to them (albeit a smaller subset of people in this case) never quite looking at all of his face when they looked at him. Obviously, he didn't have this problem with Toph, who, even when she looked at someone with her eyes, could not see them. When Zuko first met her, he had found Toph's milky eyes unnerving. Now, he counted them a comfort.

"Yeah, I do," Zuko admitted, nodding slowly.

Toph pursed her lips, her brow furrowing—she was radiating curiosity now the way a fire radiated heat. "Can I see it?" Zuko couldn't help but think that the curiosity she was showing in this was positively _morbid_.

"Why?!" Zuko had been aiming for indignant, but his voice came out as a strangled squeak. _I thought my voice had already stopped breaking_! he thought, feeling almost absurdly betrayed at the way his voice had cracked and risen nearly a whole octave.

The young girl frowned and stretched out a hand towards the general direction of Zuko's face. "Don't be such a baby," she said, grinning momentarily in a flash of white teeth. "It's no big deal, Zuko; just let me see it."

"What?" Seeing no way of deterring her, Zuko let out a sharp, exasperated breath. "Fine."

…

"Whoa! Your face feels like cotton!"

"That's my cloak hood! Of course it feels like cotton! It _is_ cotton!"

"Oh." She laughed slightly. "Sorry."

…

"…The _other_ side of my face, Toph."

Eventually, Toph found the left side of Zuko's face (Zuko not really being in the mood to help her along). As her small fingers prodded at the ridges of numb, scarred flesh, the smile faded from her lips. The inspection went on a bit longer than Zuko would have liked, across his cheek and forehead and his nose. When Toph began to probe the area around Zuko's eye, she paused, and then mercifully drew her hand away.

"Your eye doesn't open right," she declared, her face uncharacteristically serious for a situation that didn't involve a serious fight.

"Toph—"

"And don't try to fool me, either! My mom used to let me touch her face when I was little, so I'd know what a person's face looks like. Your eye isn't supposed to feel like that, Zuko."

"Don't you have any scars?" Zuko protested, trying to steer the conversation away from this topic.

Toph shrugged. "Nope." She almost sounded _annoyed_. "Whenever I got a cut or a scratch when I was little, my parents would have a physician rub this oil on the wound to keep it from scarring. And then fire whoever was supposed to be looking after me when it happened." She definitely sounded annoyed now. "And after I ran away, there was never anything that would have left a scar."

"Oh."

Zuko had heard of the Bei Fong family—more specifically, he'd heard some of the rumors surrounding the Bei Fong family. They were supposed to be a very old, very traditional house. Nevertheless, the current head was just one of many Fire Nation collaborators amongst the Earth Kingdom upper class; the man hadn't made his entire fortune by collaborating, but he'd come pretty close (And Zuko suspected that Toph knew none of this, and he wouldn't be the one to tell her). By all accounts, they sounded exactly like the sort of people Zuko expected to rub special oil on a girl's cuts to keep them from scarring, like unmarred skin was the only thing that mattered about her. Zuko wondered who the blind ones in that house really were, for Toph's parents not to realize the sort of child that she was.

She pressed her palms against the floor again. "So…" Most surprising of anything Zuko had seen or heard today (and that list included the disgusting "love scene" between the actors portraying himself and Katara), Toph actually sounded a bit hesitant. "How'd you get it?"

Zuko supposed that he should have been expecting on of his newfound friends to ask this question eventually, though to be honest, Toph had been pretty low in the queue, at least in his mind. He should have braced himself more. Polite deflection was a bit out of Zuko's range, but he would have come up with something that wasn't so obviously meant as evasion.

"I don't want to talk about it."

As it was, he would have to settle for the old standby: be as blunt as possible and hope the other person lost interest.

"Hmph." Toph crossed one leg over the other. She shut her eyes and grinned. "Knowing you, it was probably something pretty brave—and pretty stupid. I'll bet you were proud of what you did later."

Not at first. Zuko never regretted the words he'd said, but he was ashamed of himself for speaking out as he had. He was lacking in _respect_. He had _disrespected _his father, and paid a price for his disrespect so dear that he had thought that he would never lead an honorable life again. It had taken years for him to see that he had done nothing wrong.

"Yeah." Even if the memory of it still haunted his sleep some nights. Zuko smiled slightly; he could do that around Toph, whom he didn't need to school his expressions around. "Maybe."


End file.
